Re: GVB Ammit - WIP

nice updatemake sure to release this before the end of september though, NO matter how unfinished it isyou might win the newcomer price of the modeling contest, since so far i'm not having any competition on the shivan models and i would be your ony competitor in that area *shrug*

also we need to crack that 10 model threshold to activate the public prize

Re: GVB Ammit - WIP

nice updatemake sure to release this before the end of september though, NO matter how unfinished it isyou might win the newcomer price of the modeling contest, since so far i'm not having any competition on the shivan models and i would be your ony competitor in that area *shrug*

also we need to crack that 10 model threshold to activate the public prize

I have every intention of finishing and releasing in time for the contest, even if the texture ends up looking mediocre. TBH, if I had to bet, I'd say you'd win the Newcomer prize, but I'll give it a shot.

The contest has turned out to be a disappointment. Unless a lot of models are entered at the last second, we won't have a lot of entrants. While that DOES give me a better shot at the newcomer prize than I'd have had otherwise , I'm more disappointed that the contest hasn't inspired a lot of next-gen Vasudan and Shivan models.

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

Re: GVB Ammit - WIP

I don't know about FRED but in FSO, what gives the most problems is textures. Lots of big textures = bad. You can have a lot of modelled details if you keep your texture count and size down.However, if your fighter has less than 20k triangles and has one square texture of 1024,2048 or 4096 pixels, your ship is fine for FSO. Most of what I've done is above 10,000 triangles and uses 4096 pixels textures and I haven't had any troubles with them.My advice: keep the cockpit. If you want to optimize it a bit you should use a decimate modifier on the pilot. He's 1500 tris and you don't need all of those.

Re: GVB Ammit - WIP

I've still got until tomorrow, and as a major procrastinator, I'll take whatever extra time I can get.

The problem with the cockpit is that, between it and the pilot, it adds two more textures to the model. I'd heard that texture count really makes a real performance difference. I'll try decimating the pilot, and if I test it in FSO and that doesn't make a difference, I'd rather just ditch the pilot and cockpit and shave two textures off the model. I run FSO with Intelgrated graphics, and I'd like to keep this model manageable [or at least no worse than other MediaVPs models] for people like me with lower-end machines.

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

Re: GVB Ammit - WIP

Release it as-is for the contest. You can bake your textures into a single texture afterwards. It's what I do to have baked glows on my pilot. I can give you detailed instructions later if you want. It's easy once you know how.

Re: GVB Ammit - WIP

Release it as-is for the contest. You can bake your textures into a single texture afterwards. It's what I do to have baked glows on my pilot. I can give you detailed instructions later if you want. It's easy once you know how.

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

Re: GVB Ammit - 2013 MODELING CONTEST ENTRY - NEWCOMER DIVISION

nice Downloaded and added to model-contest-example-missionseems like with your ship added i've now got all the models, tomorrow will be a busy mission freding day

edit: after a first glance at it ingame i can say it does look much better now, thanks to the changed texture and of course specularitybaking the glowmap would improve the quality even further, make sure to follow The Daggers instructions and do that

"We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug."Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994

Re: GVB Ammit - 2013 MODELING CONTEST ENTRY - NEWCOMER DIVISION

1) I suppose that you have your model looking sharp and good with all debris and stuff done. I will be using the Sekhmet to show you how to bake your pilot (or other parts) into a single texture, in order to reduce the quantity of textures. Beware that texture baking may be a math intensive process for your PC; so if you have an Intelgrated setup, you'll need a lot of patience.

The Sekhmet as released uses 3 materials:-Sekhmet-map for the diffuse, mapped into Sekhmet.dds-Sekhmet-trans-map for the transpared cockpit, mapped into Sekhmet-trans.dds-Vaspilot-map for the pilot, mapped into Pilot.pngThe UV layout is called UV1 and is refered by all materials. Here's an image of the materials configuration:

UV1 includes UVs for debris too (I did it the complicated way, but since 2.68 you can use the AtlasMap addon to map several different objects into one map).

2) You'll need a new UV map. First add a new UV layout (in my case, UV2), select it and then do whatever you like to fit all your stuff into a single map. Of course your pilot UVs are huge so you'll have to reduce them. You can use the Stretch->Area option to ensure your resolution is good enough. Blue means your texture resolution is like the average, so I scale down to blue and then go up a bit, which makes it green or something (being a detailed object, the pilot deserves it).Fortunatelly, I was able to fit my pilot UV into some unused space, so I won't touch the texture further. If you can't do that, you can move things all you need, it won't change much, but take into account that baking can blur textures a bit, so I prefer to keep the other parts the same and just add the new parts in GIMP.

3) Now, create a new texture with the same size as your original one. If you don't, you'll be trying to read and write from the same file and Blender won't let you. Assign your UVs to the new map (mine's called Bake).

4) Before baking, make sure that your UV2 has the little camera on (this means that the render will use that UV instead of the other, the materials however are specified to use the other). Now you're all set. Go to the bake menu, select textures, select your mesh and hit bake!

5) Once your rendering is over, save your file and you should have something like this:

6) Now, you have to reexport your model. In order to do so, I have to delete VasPilot-map as a material and apply Sekhmet instead. If you don't want to do all the conversion again, you can just delete your subobject from PCS2 and load the new one from your dae. Don't forget to check the export options, you should have "Copy" and "Material textures" checked but nothing else in the texture part. Finally, don't forget to remove your vaspilot reference from your pof. And we're done... are we?

7) You can also bake from one object to another and this is specially usefull for debris. First, you should already have your debris mapped. Select detail0 then your debris. Then hit bake, but this time check the option (Selected to active). This way, your debris will reflect perfectly your ship texture without using it directly. The problem when your debris is mapped to your normal texture is that your glowmaps will remain glowing after your ship is destroyed which looks stupid. And once you have integrated that bake into your diffuse you can add all the wear and tear you want to those debris.This is how it looked like with debris baked:

[

There is some nonsense there over the cuted areas but you should be texturing over those anyway so it's no problem.

So, why should we go into all this trouble? 1- Lots of textures is bad for Freespace AFAIK. Reducing them is good.2- Having firing debris instead of glowing blue bits of a ship looks cooler.3- You could use the same technique to transform a tiled ship into a "UVmapped" ship.4- Once you have a mapped mesh, you can add ambient occlusion and baked glowmaps. But baking glowmaps is another story...